Half an hour goes by really fast

I have never had a good grasp of the passage of time. I used to think that it was just a thing, you know, no one ever really does have a good grasp of the passage of time, but revelations about my neurology show that it’s actually more acute for me than I thought. Or imagined.

The Sock Puppet is awake this morning. Didn’t take long to spool up.

I am not a morning person. I appreciate mornings in a mechanical sense; I can, with effort, shake my mind to some relative plateau of awareness, and I like the quiet and the dim gray light. But morning s are not a natural state for me. Part of it, I suppose, is the wheeling and churning of my head which I thought everyone dealt with — I thought it was just a natural part of being human.

Again, this particular wheel-spinning appears to be more severe and constant that the majority of the human crowd.

Why am I focusing on differences so much? Because I have always felt wrong, never quite right, always hiding some secret fatal flaw. Other people can start their assignments on time. Early, even. Not me. Never me. I managed it only once. It was nice. Never been able to do it again.

So how am I here this morning? Or yesterday morning? Or the day before? It’s not a big leap to stand up a little bit after my alarm goes off and turn on the computer. The rest sort of carries itself. But I do have to fight inertia. A lot of inertia, in fact. There’s a lot of brinkmanship with my own mind, a small distraction, a gentle shove or tap as momentum takes hold so I can get at least a little bit of desired behavior.

If I’m aware of the manipulation I’ll oppose it entirely.

I’ve talked a lot about intrinsic and extrinsic motivations with people, and possibly on this blog. I honestly can’t remember. Extrinsic motivation is a poor motivator for anyone — you take a kid who loves playing with her Nintendo DS, start giving her rewards for playing, and she’ll stop. She’ll lose interest. Human trait.

Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand — hooks that keep her interested because she’s interested, for whatever reason, with no outside pressures to maintain that interest — that can last for a lifetime, and it can be consistent. For me, though, even that waxes and wanes. Does it do that for other people? I’m asking because since my diagnosis, I question most of my set-points in relation to neurotypical set-points. I used to not do that, and it made me miserable.

That impostor syndrome? I have that with life in general.

So, then, why am I here? Maybe it’s a bit of morning pages. Maybe it’s because I really do want to make better use of this blog and this seems to be working, for the moment (the Sock Puppet is awake, but distractible). Maybe it’s because I like the sensation of having accomplished something before I’ve even headed off to work. Actually, that might be a good part of it.

But I think it’s a way of proving a lot of the negative internal mechanisms wrong. “No one cares what you think” then no one will read this and no harm no foul. “Why bother writing” because writing helps organize thought and God knows I need help with organization any chance I get. “You’re writing into the ether” so see no harm no foul and also, someone might read this and get a notion that they’re not alone.

I don’t often talk about the internal things because I’ve been humiliated by people for expressing them; mocked for being juvenile or lesser or weaker or trivial or whatever. And it’s happened consistently enough, on and off, that I just don’t go poking around the soft thinky bits in public.

Hence the morning time slot, to get around these defense mechanisms.

So maybe this is also a stab at self-improvement. A way to get inured to the things that mortified me in my earlier years. Own the things that are mine despite the mockery and derision of others. My friends don’t do this, and on the rare occasion that they do and I tell them I’ve been hurt, they take me seriously, and that’s what matters, so the shit-stain tactics of strangers shouldn’t get me down.

That’s a road to ruin, but maybe it’s worth taking.

At any rate, a half hour isn’t a very long time and it goes by quickly. But the fifteen minutes it took for me to write all of this hasn’t, in fact, gone by quickly at all. Not that it went by at an agonizing pace. It just went by. There’s probably a lesson in mindfulness here, but it’s too early in the morning for me to internalize.